‘It’s much more difficult when you love all of humanity,’ I said spitefully. ‘You spread yourself too thin.’
‘But that’s the point,’ he said. ‘I’ve lost my love of humanity. There’s too much of it, you can’t possibly keep it up. Unless you have God, of course. God helps. But, anyway, it’s gone. All my grand pity, dissipated.’ He stabbed a potato, and shoved it into his mouth.
‘Why, then, you are bereaved!’ I said.
‘Actually,’ he said, ‘that’s exactly how it feels. It’s a terrible thing to lose.’
‘Are you sure anyone wanted your pity in the first place?’
‘Morwenna, my love, sometimes you are such a superficial little bitch. I don’t mean, “I feel really sorry for her because she’s so fat.” I mean that quality of human understanding that raises us above the beasts.’
‘Perhaps it will come back.’
‘Perhaps. But, anyway, I needed a break. I got homesick.’
Matthew returned with the brown sauce. There was a faecal-like coagulation around the lid, which he wiped off with a damp cloth before handing it to Corwin. Corwin slathered the sauce over his potatoes. Matthew did likewise.
‘Talking of the human condition,’ said Matthew, ‘here is one of life’s great mysteries. Brown sauce. What do you think it is?’
‘Best not to enquire,’ said Corwin.
‘I quite agree,’ said Matthew.
I felt depressed, all of a sudden. Somehow we were talking as though we were at a 1930s house party. I almost expected to be jollied off to play tennis. Matthew broke the yolk of one of his eggs and brown sauce pooled into it.
‘I thought I’d take a walk after breakfast,’ said Corwin, mopping his plate with a piece of Matthew’s bread. ‘Anyone want to come?’
Matthew and I looked over to the window. It was raining heavily.
‘No?’ Corwin jumped up from his seat. His jeans hung from his belt. He really had lost a lot of weight. ‘I’ll be back for lunch.’
When he’d gone, Matthew took my hand. ‘I think he wanted to be alone,’ he said consolingly. ‘It’s hardly surprising. Still, I don’t remember him being quite so …’ he paused to find the word ‘… so … brisk. Do you?’
When Corwin came back he went straight upstairs to take a bath. He passed me on the stairs, and stopped to give me a rain-drenched hug. Then he lay in the bath for a long, long time. Every so often the plumbing whistled into action as he added hot water. When he reappeared, with his beard trimmed close and smelling faintly of grapefruit, he was calmer again, gentler. We alternated tea and wine all afternoon by the fire, talking of everything and nothing, while Matthew sat with his crossword, tuning in and out. That was Corwin’s homecoming present to me: one last unspoiled lazy afternoon.
14.
The book that Matthew had pulled out for me lay on the coffee table and Corwin picked it up. ‘The Ghosts of Dartmoor.’
‘Matthew wants me to rebind it.’
‘Were you going to send it to me?’
‘I hadn’t thought that far ahead. Anyway, you’re here now. Do you want it?’
‘Do you remember when we went looking for the Devil?’
‘Of course.’
This was one of our favourite stories. Only Matthew knew it – or if our parents had ever known, they pretended not to.
‘You were so scared,’ said Corwin.
‘No, I wasn’t!’
Corwin had packed a Thermos flask of hot chocolate and for each of us an apple and a KitKat. He had bought the KitKats with his own pocket money in order not to arouse suspicion. In his rucksack were also a torch, spare batteries, two umbrellas, a Swiss army knife, a reflective blanket, in case of hypothermia, and 50p in 10p pieces for the telephone, in case of emergencies. Our parents were watching Brideshead Revisited – I remember the programme because my father usually refused to watch television, but everyone was talking about Brideshead Revisited and he had been seduced into watching it. Corwin wanted to be at the Devil’s Stone well before midnight because, he argued, if midnight was the witching hour then you had to get there before the witches, who would need to get there early themselves in order to prepare. I had no wish to meet the Devil, and was alarmed by the hiatus following the words ‘to prepare’. ‘For what?’ I wanted to ask, as I pulled my boots over my pyjamas and zipped up my quilted jacket. It seemed to me that at the end of that sentence was a bubbling cauldron big enough to fit two eleven-year-olds, but I was tractable and, as ever, I followed where Corwin led.
‘You had some questions for him,’ I remembered, laughing.
‘I was going to ask him how old he is, and what’s the worst thing you can do without having to go to Hell, and what his real actual name is.’
‘And then,’ I recited, ‘you were going to punch him in the nose.’
We hid behind the trunk of the big oak tree that stood in the middle of the field, and we ate our KitKats listening to the rain falling on the leaves, wrapped up against hypothermia and watching the stone. It disappeared and reappeared as the clouds moved across the moon, and I experienced for the first time the immeasurable loneliness of transgression. And that’s the end of that cute story because Matthew was out on his wanderings and came limping over the field towards us, attracted by the shining silver blanket, swinging his walking stick. We looked up at him and he looked down at us and whispered, ‘Boo!’ Then he dragged us back down the hill before we had even been missed. The following day Matthew added to the map a tiny picture of Corwin, wearing his tan and orange T-shirt and raising his fists at the Devil.
‘Do you remember how much you cried over that because he didn’t paint you too?’ said Corwin.
‘At least two hours. And then Matthew came upstairs and said, “Pull yourself together, child!”’
‘He said, “You were just tagging along. It was Corwin who went looking for him.” And you said …’
‘And I said, “But he could never have gone looking for him without me.”’
‘Which was true,’ said Corwin, quietly.
‘Which was true,’ I echoed.
I might have simply stayed in Thornton with Matthew and Corwin. Matthew, I had been told, was dying. And Corwin was unsettled. I felt responsible towards them both. Perhaps it was time to move back. In winter Thornton felt completely cut off; it was possible to imagine an existence protected from the rest of the world.
Corwin could not relax. He would disappear before I woke and return at nightfall. Once or twice I went down to the cabin expecting to find him there, but the cabin was empty. He would not talk about Africa, except to say that he had no intention of going back for the time being. He said he had come back slowly, covering as much of the journey as possible overland. He had not wanted simply to fall asleep in an aeroplane and wake up at Heathrow. He had needed to put enough hours and miles into the journey to place distance between There and Here.
Then one night, about a week after he had returned, and after Matthew had gone to bed, he asked, ‘Did you ever read that last book you sent me?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s just something I found on the shelf. I liked the engravings.’
‘You should read it.’
‘I never read them,’ I said.
He seemed to change the subject. ‘Did you ever see that movie, The Gods Must Be Crazy?’
‘No. I don’t think so.’
‘The one where an empty Coca-Cola bottle falls out of the sky and it lands on a Bushman’s head?’
‘No.’
‘So, someone throws an empty Coke bottle out of a plane and the tribe thinks it’s a gift from the gods because it’s such a useful tool. It’s great for mashing yam and breaking nuts and stretching hide but there’s only one, so pretty soon they’re fighting over it and on the verge of killing each other with the thing. So they hold a council and send one of the Bushmen on a journey to the end of the world to return the bottle to the gods, because it has brought strife where before there was harmony. I laughed li
ke a drain the first time I saw it. But then I watched it again, a few years later, and that time it just didn’t seem that funny any more because it was such a neat metaphor for the central contradiction of my career, which is that something that appears helpful often just makes things worse.’
I contemplated my brother, his restlessness, his irritability. I didn’t believe in talking about things. I believed that talking about things only inflated problems, but just in case it was something I ought to do, I ventured, ‘Did something happen, Corwin?’
He ignored the question. ‘It’s like time travel – you might go back in time and interfere in order to avert a tragedy, but how can you possibly know what your interference might unleash? Dozens of bad films have been based on that premise. Anyway, the answer is, you can’t. You can’t know.’
I said, ‘I wish you’d shave off that beard. I don’t recognize you with it.’
‘Are you listening?’
‘You’re speaking in parables. You know how much that pisses me off.’
He pretended that I had said something else. ‘Let me tell you about my first Coca-Cola-bottle experience.’
At the heart of the house the central heating clanked off with a shudder; it was as if I could see the heat beginning to seep out through the cracks around the window frames and to see the sucking cold pull in under the door of the living room from the stone hall floor.
‘It was in Mozambique,’ he continued. ‘I was living in this village in the hills. These hills were like nothing you see here – imagine vast termite mounds, and as red as termite mounds, and orange dust everywhere, and the sun going down as orange as the dust.’
I said, ‘I’ve never seen a termite mound.’
‘Of course,’ he said, his voice getting harder, ‘I was deeply in love with the country and had made valiant efforts to absorb the lore and dialect of the district. I had learned how to wash my underpants, clean my body and brush my teeth using only a single cup of water and I had been made aware of the explosive radii of various types of landmine.’
I said, ‘You’ve told me that before, at least five times, your single-cup-of-water story. I bet it’s one of your pick-up lines.’
‘I shared a house with this German girl called Inge, who had the most beautiful feet. We slept together whenever we’d had too much to drink. There was no electricity and we were a long way from town and there was very little to do in the evenings. Inge, like me, was enchanted to be in a place where, only about a year before, the population had been at each other’s throats, murdering, raping, and dragging each other’s children off to be soldiers. All that sublimated violence in the air made for great sex. Some nights, when the rains came, we would sit on the veranda and listen to the thunder and watch the lightning play around the hills. We’d be totally transported, as if we were watching a firework display.
‘Anyway,’ he said – fixing the word, like a threat, ‘I was there to dig a well – or, rather, to supervise the men of the village in building the well, and to teach them how to maintain it. The women of the village were having to walk about eight miles to the nearest source of water, carrying babies and pots. There was this one woman who limped along on a badly fitting prosthetic leg, and there was another who was so ancient and so thin and so folded over that her shoulder-blades rose out of her back like wings. They liked me, because it had been explained to them that I was about to improve their lives for them, and because I was something exotic. People used to reach out to touch me to see what my white skin felt like. Sometimes, in the morning, when they walked past my veranda they sang and clapped out a rhythm and my heart swelled, because I wanted them to love me, each and every one of them, especially the girl who had lost her leg.
‘So we built them their well. And do you know what happened? No? Haven’t I told you this story before? Well, what happened was, they stopped singing as they passed my veranda. Instead, whenever I came near they made that sound, which is the most efficient and devastating expression of contempt on the whole planet: the sound of sucked teeth. Inge and I used to try to imitate it, but we could never get it right. It’s a kind of inverse snake hiss, and only the centre of the lips may move. And then you have to get the head movement, a sharp but subtle bird-like jerk away from the object of your disdain.
‘You see, it turned out, after I’d been to a couple more outlying villages and dug a couple more wells, that, while it had seemed a good idea at the time not to have to spend five or six hours a day fetching water, the women had discovered that they had liked being away from the men. I had lost them their hours of freedom and they blamed me for interfering.’
‘Are you going to tell me what all this is about?’ I asked. ‘Why are you back?’
‘She went south – Inge,’ he said. ‘Married a Dutch peacekeeper.’
He stopped abruptly, and composed himself. ‘All of which,’ he said, looking at me kindly, ‘is a rather long-winded way of saying that it is extremely difficult to know if and when to intervene in the course of things and it is not something that I take lightly. I am a cautious time traveller.’
‘You’ve lost me,’ I said. ‘I don’t understand a word you’re saying.’
‘Two things happened,’ he said. ‘And I don’t know which happened first or if, perhaps, they’re interdependent. But the first is what I’ve told you already, although you thought I was being flippant. I lost my compassion. It is the greatest loss I’ve ever experienced – my whole life, you see, I’ve had a tenderness for my fellow human. It was what I had instead of faith – my belief in human dignity, in the value of doing what you can to shore up the dignity of others. And then that sense just disappeared. The noise, the fucking noise, you can’t imagine, those refugee camps – radios and dogs and chickens and screaming children and constant arguing and bickering. I began to feel this deep, corrosive contempt. It was like a virus. It completely took me over. For years you think of the children as beautiful and exuberant and vulnerable, and then suddenly you see them as voracious parasites who would kill you for a packet of paracetamol.’
Corwin stopped again. ‘It’s getting cold,’ he said, and stood up to get some more logs. While he was out of the room I moved closer to the hearth and fiddled with the dying embers. I desperately wanted to go to bed but that would have been unforgivable. He came back and stoked up the fire into a flaming roar.
‘You’re very quiet.’
‘You’re very talkative. You sound like you could do with a proper break.’
‘Well, like I said, I got homesick.’
‘What was the second thing?’
‘Ah, yes, the second thing. That concerns us both. You see, this idea lodged in my head, and I couldn’t shake it free. I need to test it on you.’
‘On me?’
‘Yes. I want you to think about what it would mean if Dad’s fall wasn’t an accident.’
This came at a complete tangent. ‘What do you mean?’
‘We never questioned what happened,’ said Corwin. ‘And then one day I did – the question was there. What if it wasn’t an accident? What if there was deliberation?’
‘Why are you saying this? What are you saying, exactly?’
‘I just need you to give it some thought – I don’t want to influence you. But I need to know from you, if it wasn’t an accident, what was it?’
‘You’re not making sense,’ I said. ‘Nothing you’re saying makes sense to me. Dad was pissed.’
Corwin said, ‘Please, Morwenna. Just think about it. Did we miss something?’
I stood up. ‘I’m going back to London. It’s time I got back to work. I’m going to lose my job and my boyfriend if I carry on like this.’
‘He knew every square millimetre of that coast path!’ Corwin said quietly. ‘He could have danced home backwards with a bottle of vodka inside him and not fallen off!’
‘This is your mid-life crisis. I’m not sharing it with you.’
Corwin said nothing more. He was allowing his words to settl
e. I left him sitting on the floor beside the fire. I packed my bag, then made myself a coffee, wrote my excuses in a note for Matthew, which I placed on the kitchen table, and left the house.
Outside I caught my breath. I had forgotten the moon. The combe was glowing, as though revealing its soul – the daguerreotype plate of itself. The sharp shadows cut into the fields, like deep, dark secrets. It was as though the moon were not casting the light but drawing it from the sea. And it was then that I asked myself for the first time: Did, on such a night, my father deliberately step off the cliff at Brock Tor? The doubt was seeded. I climbed into Ed’s car and lanced the moon’s enchantment with the slam of the door and the yellow of the high beams and drove back to London. I could not have slept now even if I had wanted to.
In London the moon was lost in the streetlight glow. I parked Ed’s car on his street and posted the key through his letterbox. At home all trace of pigeon was gone, and when I went into the living room, I saw that Ed had had my window re-glazed.
15.
At the bindery no one, not even Ana, commented on my two weeks’ absence. I experienced a delirium of love towards everyone there, even though there was an atmosphere of disapproval and no one was commenting on my absence because no one was really speaking to me. This was the only safe place left. I worked through my lunch break and long after everyone else had gone. I thought quite seriously of simply lying down on the floor and sleeping there, but was able to laugh off the thought and cycled home late, stopping off at the corner shop for soup and sliced bread. And that was how I spent my week. I unplugged the landline, kept my mobile switched off and ignored my computer. But on the Friday, as we all drifted off for our weekends, a fear set in. This was a feeling I had never experienced before – anxiety, yes, and jolts of adrenalin, but not this. This sat like extreme cold in my pelvis, which ached with it. I couldn’t shake the idea that somehow Corwin had become dangerous to me.
With the fear came an animal furtiveness and alertness. I noticed smells I had not noticed before – the Friday-night stench of end-of-week cigarettes, exhaled Pinot Grigio, and happy-hour perfumes sprayed on in workplace washrooms. The girls looked unsafe on their enormous heels. I felt acutely concerned for them. How would they run if they needed to?
The House at the Edge of the World Page 11